Student fined for keeping live chickens

Plenty of university students have stashed the odd traffic cone or road sign in their room. But at Oxford, it seems, they like to go one better. One undergraduate has been reprimanded for keeping live chickens in her accommodation, while another received a £78.07 (Dh468) fine for storing a hay bale in her room. Others have been punished for throwing eggs, trashing rooms and even keeping their neighbours awake with their antics between the sheets. Exasperated deans dish out fines of around £30,000 every year for bad behaviour as well as hundreds of hours in community service penalties, figures revealed yesterday. Fines range from £62 for library charges up to £300 for vandalism and persistent noise pollution. The students paying the heaviest penalties are those living at the elite St Edmund Hall college, which counts Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer and the late broadcast journalist Sir Robin Day among its former students. Last year, the college collected almost £2,500 in fines. Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show that across the university, more than half of fines are given out for bad behaviour. The documents reveal that one Oxford student received a warning after they kept fellow undergraduates awake by having really loud sex, while two male undergraduates were made to complete 10 hours of community service when they were caught throwing eggs in residence. From / Gulf News